A celebration of good humour and creative risk with new exhibition, ‘Worst Record Covers in the World’

Some of the most dreadful – and unintentionally hilarious – record sleeves ever conceived are to go on display at Warrington Museum this month.

Collector Steve Goldman will present ‘The Worst Record Covers in the World’ at the historic venue between Saturday, 19 October, and Sunday, 19 January.

Steve’s weird and wonderful set includes around 500 obscure albums and singles that he has collected over seven years. For a record to make his collection, it simply has to be ‘sufficiently bad’ and make him laugh.

Usually this is due to a concept or design choice on the cover that has gone horribly wrong, inadvertently making it very amusing or cringe-worthy. But there are rules too. The artworks can’t be disgusting, gory, violent, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or racist. Just good, clean fun.

It all started for Steve three decades ago when he bought Roadstar by Peter Rabbitt in a bargain bin for 10p.

He said: “I picked it up simply because it had such an extraordinarily bad cover – rabbits picked out of a hat, with the band's awkward faces amateurishly superimposed. Subsequently I lost it. Then the internet came along, and I thought: ‘I’ll find it now’ but every time I typed in ‘Peter Rabbitt’, Beatrix Potter came up.

“Then someone said: ‘Have you tried Discogs? It’s the marketplace for all things vinyl’. I typed it in and it came up straight away! So I ordered it. It was a bit more expensive this time, £5 plus another fiver to have it shipped from Germany.

“But when it arrived, it was one of the happiest moments of my life. And that evening, I said to my family: ‘Do you know what, I think I’ll collect crap record covers…’”

Steve did just that, and after amassing hundreds of records from Discogs and charity shop trawls, he started to exhibit the collection up and down the country a few years ago. Warrington will be his ninth exhibition.

He has even met one or two of the artists along the way.

Steve, a computer programmer, added: “There’s an LP called Cirkus One from the early 70s – it depicts the Earth with a pair of massive beer pumps and an adult with an umbilical cord being born from it. When we had an exhibition in Alnwick, the singer from the band turned up – and agreed that it was a crap cover!”

From the bizarre to the curious, the record sleeves will have a new lease of life on display at Warrington Museum for three months. But not only that, people can hear a selection of the music in the exhibition space via a video – and even vote for their favourite ‘worst record’.

It will be the first exhibition at Warrington Museum focused on humour and, while curator Roger Jeffery wants it to bring a wry smile to visitors’ faces, he also sees the showcase as a celebration of creative risk.

Roger said: “Recent exhibitions focusing on the work of Andie Airfix, the late graphic designer who worked in the music industry, and Curtis Jobling, an artist, author and animation creator, have been really popular with our visitors and have shown that there’s an appetite for going beyond the traditional mediums of fine art.

“I think it’s really powerful to see familiar items that people have grown up with, such as album covers, displayed and celebrated in museums, and we’ll be building on that line of programming in the future.

“This is another exhibition about music and album design but it takes it in a very different direction because instead of celebrating good design, we’re seeing what happens when it goes wrong.

“But we’re still celebrating creativity in the sense that, what is creativity without the risk of failure? With this show, we’re also leaning into the realm of comedy, which is another interesting new direction that I hope visitors will enjoy!”

Steve added: “The concepts of ‘museum exhibition’ and ‘funny’ are usually mutually exclusive! But since I’ve started exhibiting, there’s been so much to enjoy – the planning, putting it up, the video and attending and seeing other people laugh. That’s what it’s all about.”

Listings information
Exhibition title: The Worst Record Covers in the World
Dates: 19 October to 19 January
Admission: Free
Location: Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, Museum Street, Warrington, WA1 1JB
wmag.culturewarrington.org